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Monday, June 1, 2009

Hard Drive Performance

In the last couple of weeks I have installed a few replacement hard drives. While doing so I thought I would take the opportunity to do some performance testing on those drives. The first drive in the line up is my Seagate 140 Gig 7200 RPM SATA drive that came with my MacBook Pro. The Second drive is a Western Digital 7200 RPM 320 GB SATA Drive that I installed into a friends Mac Book Pro. The third is the latest 7200 RPM 500 GB SATA drive from Seagate that I just installed in my MacBook Pro.

First I have to say having more than 300 GB free on my laptop is great. I am not worried about running out of space anytime soon at least. That being said what about performance? I used Xbench for my testing and my test results were a little surprising. The Seagate 140 being the oldest drive it is not surprising it is also the slowest by far. The two newer drives the results are not quiet so clear.

While some of the early reports of performance on this drive indicate it should be faster than the 320 GB hard drive my testing is indicating that is not the case. The extra storage is beneficial and the performance is fairly close. Hopefully there is something that can be changed or configured to get additional performance out of the hard drive.

I would say the 500 GB is worth the price and the performance increase is good enough if you are using a hard drive that is more than a year old you will get a performance gain. If I find a way to increase performance I will make sure I post it.

1 comment:

How difficult is it to upgrade the hard drive on a MacBook? Mine is running out of room, however, mostly due to archive stuff that I just need to transfer to an external archive HDD I own. I'm just wondering how easy the install is to do, I remember doing it on one of those colourful clamshell iBooks, but that was easy because the whole keyboard just popped out. I don't know what all is required on a MacBook.